SEO for Recruitment Agencies (UK)

UK searches for "recruitment agency seo" reached 210 a month by September 2026 (DataForSEO Google keyword data, pulled 24 September 2026). Agencies are asking how to rank because their clients increasingly read an AI answer first: Ofcom found about 30 percent of UK keyword searches return an AI Overview (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). This guide shows what those answers looked like for recruitment on the day we checked.

The competition is large. The REC counted 31,345 UK recruitment businesses in 2025, and agencies made 536,400 permanent placements in 2024, down 33.5 percent from 806,400 the year before (REC, 8 December 2025). Fewer placements spread across the same number of firms is why client enquiries from search now matter more to most agencies.

What Google UK showed for recruitment searches on 21 October 2026

We ran six recruitment searches through DataForSEO's live Google results for the United Kingdom (desktop, English) and recorded whether an AI Overview appeared and which sites it cited.

What the six results tell a recruitment agency:

• Fee questions go to an AI Overview. Google answered both fee searches in writing, with contingency fees of 15 to 20 percent for standard roles and 25 to 35 percent for retained search, and cited two agency fee guides plus GOV.UK. Those are the overview's figures, not ours, but they show which page type gets quoted.
• City searches go to the map pack. "IT recruitment agency London" showed no AI Overview. Office pages and Google Business Profiles decided the top of that page.
• "Best" searches go to the big brands. The overview named Hays, Reed and Michael Page and cited their own websites. A small agency is better spending effort on narrower sector and city searches.
• One result changes between runs. AI Overviews are generated per search and can differ by day and device, so treat this table as a dated snapshot.

Write the fee page the AI Overview wants to quote

Hiring managers ask what a recruiter costs before they ask who to call. A fee page that states your model in the first two lines is the page most likely to be lifted into that answer. Include:

• Your fee as a percentage of first-year salary for permanent roles, by seniority if it varies.
• Retained, exclusive and contingency terms, and what each one includes.
• Your rebate or free-replacement period if a hire leaves early.
• When a temp-to-perm transfer fee applies. GOV.UK sets the rules: a transfer fee only applies if the hirer is offered an extension instead, and the permanent job starts within 8 weeks of the end of the assignment or 14 weeks from its start, whichever is later (GOV.UK, transfer fees).
• A short FAQ answering the exact questions clients ask your consultants.

Sector and city pages for hiring managers, not doorway pages

Job boards hold most job-title searches, so the searches a recruitment agency can win are employer searches such as "construction recruitment agency Leeds". Build one page per sector you recruit for, then a city page only where you have an office, placements or a consultant in that market. Google's spam policies name city or region pages that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse, and mass-generated pages made mainly to rank as scaled content abuse (Google spam policies, updated 28 August 2026). Twenty-five near-identical town pages written by an AI tool is exactly that pattern.

What makes a sector or city page worth ranking:

• Live roles in that sector and city, pulled from your job feed.
• Salary ranges you have placed at, with the month you placed them.
• Named clients or anonymised placements, with permission.
• The consultant who covers it, with a photo and a direct line.
• Time to shortlist and time to hire from your own records.

JobPosting structured data: what Google requires

JobPosting markup is what makes a live role eligible for Google's job search experience. Google's JobPosting documentation lists the required properties: datePosted, description, hiringOrganization, jobLocation and title, plus applicantLocationRequirements and jobLocationType for fully remote roles. Salary (baseSalary), employmentType and validThroughare recommended. Three rules matter most to agencies. When you post for an anonymous client, Google asks you to set the hiring organisation name to "confidential". Leaving expired roles up "may result in a manual action". And Google recommends its Indexing API rather than sitemaps for job pages. Mark up one role per page and keep the visible description identical to the structured data.

Add Organization markup on your home page and LocalBusiness markup on each office page, so the name, address and phone number match your Google Business Profile exactly.

Google Business Profile for every office

Two of our six searches showed a map pack. For "[sector] recruitment agency [city]" searches that pack is the first thing a hiring manager sees. Claim a profile for each staffed office, choose "Employment agency" as the primary category, add the sectors you cover as services, and ask clients and placed candidates for reviews after each placement. Keep the name, address and phone number identical across the profile, your website and directories such as the REC member directory.

Technical checks for a recruitment website

• Job pages render in the server HTML, not only through a JavaScript job widget. AI crawlers and many tools read the raw HTML.
• Google's Indexing API for job pages, which Google recommends over sitemaps, plus an XML sitemap with accurate lastmod dates for everything else.
• Expired roles return a 404 or 410, or redirect to the sector page. Do not leave closed roles live with JobPosting markup.
• If you syndicate roles to Indeed, Reed or Totaljobs, the version on your own site carries the full description.
• Core Web Vitals in the good range: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1, Google's published thresholds.
• robots.txt allows the AI retrieval crawlers you want quoting you, such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, by name.

How to measure recruitment SEO in 2026

• Client enquiries from organic search, tracked as a GA4 key event, separate from candidate applications.
• Search Console clicks on fee, sector and city pages. Google counts AI Overview and AI Mode traffic inside the normal Web report, with no separate filter (Google, AI features).
• Map pack position for your top sector and city searches, checked from the city itself.
• AI answer mentions: run the ten questions your clients ask in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity each month and log who is named.

Related reading: what UK SEO costs by business type in our UK SEO cost guide, how we run AI SEO, GEO and AEO for UK businesses, our UK local SEO service for map pack work, and the UK SEO and AI visibility audit.

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